Before and After Ghostcatching
Animation, Primitivism, and the Choreography of Vitality
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Abstract
Primitivism gathers together several hegemonic lines of thinking about otherness as a function of underdevelopment vis-à-vis the Western, white male subject. This article presents an analysis of the animated dance video Ghostcatching (Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar, 1999) that offers a framework for understanding the piece’s thoughtful relationship to the history of primitivism in animation. Positioning the dancing body and the motion-capture apparatus at the center of understandings of the supposedly pre-rational and uncivilized, I argue that Ghostcatching is an expert commentary on animation’s long-standing investment in notions of human origins and development. Ghostcatching and related animations (including its stereoscopic 3-D reworking, After Ghostcatching; Betty Boop cartoons of the 1930s; the Dancing Baby meme; and work by media artist Ian Cheng) provide a lens for examining technologies and discourses of motion capture, revealing the economy of vitality through which the energy of raced, infantilized, and animalized bodies are circulated.
Contributor Notes
Heather Warren-Crow is assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Texas Tech University. Her scholarship centers on the relationship between media aesthetics and processes of subjectivation in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century contexts. Recent publications include the article “Screaming Like a Girl: Viral Video and the Work of Reaction” (Feminist Media Studies Studies, 2016), the performance text “Leash” (Women and Performance, 2015), and the monograph Girlhood and the Plastic Image (Dartmouth College Press, 2014). Dr. Warren-Crow is also an artist who has exhibited live and media-based performances at galleries around the world. She has a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. E-mail: heather.warren-crow@ttu.edu